Referring to FIG. 1, currently the vast majority of digital television program providers, whether cable, satellite, or terrestrial transmissions, transmit digital content from transmitting station 110 to satellite 125 via channel 120. Satellite 125 retransmits the digital content digital to one or more satellite dishes 130. Satellite dish 130 may be a large satellite dish owned and operated by a local cable company, or it may a personal satellite dish serving one home. The satellite dish then transmits the content, usually via bi-directional coaxial cable 140, to each cable subscriber via set-top-box (STB) 150. STB 150 demodulates, or extracts information from, the digital signal in the form of packets, or fragments, from the carrier, and performs different signal processing techniques, i.e. error correcting, demultiplexing, descrambling and decoding to decode the digital programs in the form of video, audio or data, and converts such digital data to analog form to playback such decoded signals on a TV set as shown in FIG. 1. Such connection between the playback device (TV) and the STB are done with cables and use the analog signals produced by the STB.
Today, the relationship between a traditional set top box and a hand held device is limited to hand held devices, and more specifically, only personal video devices, downloading, for later viewing, the content which is currently being viewed from the set top box.
The instant invention represents an improvement over wide area hand held receivers utilizing the DVB-H or DMB standards. DVB-H, or Digital Video Broadcasting, refers to the hand held version of DVB-T or Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial, which is a system for the Terrestrial broadcast of signals destined for playback on hand held devices. DMB, or Digital Multimedia Broadcast, is a digital radio transmission system for sending multimedia (radio, TV, and datacasting) to mobile devices such as mobile phones.
The current system has proven inadequate for most wireless applications, and in particular, to mobile wireless devices. Mobile wireless devices generally fall under the category of hand held devices, and include cell phones, personal digital assistants (pda's), etc. These devices share the common characteristic of being small, easily transported, and useable under most circumstances. Unlike portable computers and other larger mobile devices, hand-held devices do not require a surface to be placed on, nor do they usually have fixed or removable, mass storage devices such as hard drives, magneto-optical drives, or optical drives. The storage is generally limited to on-board memory or small removable memory such as flash media cards.
The difficulty with transmitting content, and in particular, rich media, defined as content exhibiting one or more characteristics of user interaction, advanced animation, and or audio/video is that it requires large bandwidth and bi-directional communication for error correction. Small, wireless devices generally do not have the available bandwidth or sufficient power to reach the content distributor to request that corrupted packets of information be resent. Also, current systems do not provide a practical means for reasonable interaction between a hand held device and a television program.
In the present invention, digital data encoded to be received by one or more handheld devices for playback is inserted into the transport stream by the content provider and is transmitted via satellite, cable or terrestrial television digital channels to a STB and wirelessly re-transmitted to a handheld receiver for decoding and playback using modern forms of wireless transmission such as Bluetooth, infrared, fast-infrared (FIR) or 802.11x. Such data can be digitally compressed audio, video, program information, hypertext links, game files, etc.
In the present invention, the set-top box obtains instructions from the wireless device regarding what content to transmit to it. The STB uses the index data supplied by the broadcaster embedded in the data stream to determine what content to transmit.